I recently enjoyed working through the exercises in Chris Jackson's book Flash + AfterEffects and I learned a lot about After Effects. I'm a beginner in After Effects and somewhere between a beginner and intermediate in Flash so I learned more about After Effects than Flash. Someone with less experience in Flash than me would probably learn more about it than I did. However, the book does assume "a working knowledge of the Flash workspace and an understanding of animation concepts and basic ActionScript." To give a better idea of my After Effects background: I had previously worked through most of the Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book exercises and had viewed and practiced numerous AE tutorials on lynda.com and had very limited experience using AE on real projects. I think it would be helpful to have some basic After Effects experience before coming to this book. The book's back cover indicates a target user level of "intermediate to advanced Flash designers."

This installment in the Visual QuickStart series is another predictably useful volume. Like some of the other books in the VQS series this one is primarily a cookbook of code samples. Want to know how to hide an HTML element? Check pages 16-17. Want to know how to bind an event handler to an event? See pp. 82-83. Want to employ visual effects such as fading page elements in and out? Or slide elements up and down? It's all here and lots more.

The downside of this cookbook approach is that much of the book is boilerplate. As you proceed through the book, you quickly become familiar with the drill. Each two-page section covers a single jQuery feature. Each one starts with a few short paragraphs of explanation and is followed by sample code and step-by-step instructions for entering it. Some of this repetition is tedious and unnecessary. You don't need to tell a JavaScript coder to "open a text editor (such as Microsoft WordPad)…" in every example throughout the book (and there are dozens of examples). I'm pretty sure your average software developer can figure that part out on his or her own.